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Subj: Star Trek: Thoughts from a lifelong Trekker ... Posted: Wed May 13, 2009 at 09:23:20 pm EDT (Viewed 475 times) | |||
The past decade or so has been a very tough time to be a fan of either Star Trek or Star Wars. Indeed, with both fandoms, I've become more of a lapsed fan than anything else (and here, I use the term "lapsed" in the same way that my father, who was brought up Catholic but became atheist, describes himself as a "lapsed Catholic," because just as you never really stop being a Catholic, even after you stop practicing or believing, you never really stop being a fan, either, even if you fall away from your fandoms). As such, I was highly skeptical of the new Star Trek movie. I find J.J. Abrams to be entirely overrated. I was entirely unimpressed with Zachary Quinto as Sylar, in the few episodes of Heroes past the pilot that I could summon enough interest to watch. Chris Pine looked way too Paul Walker for me to take seriously (yes, even by the inherently silly standards of a character played most famously by William Shatner). Especially as a Spider-Man fan, I was reflexively resistant to the idea of any sort of "reboot" of the Star Trek timeline, and the rumored spoilers all seemed to indicate that the new direction for the franchise was already on the wrong track. The ad campaign certainly didn't do this movie any favors, either, since the trailers made it look like a goddamn Mountain Dew commercial directed by Poochie from The Simpsons. Most importantly, I'd already been burned by so many diminishing returns from the Star Trek movies preceding this one that I couldn't even summon up enough interest to be all that upset. Hell, if my mom hadn't wanted to go see this movie for Mother's Day, I probably wouldn't even have seen it myself (yes, my mom, the woman who is so fandom illiterate that she actually said that her least favorite Star TREK movie was "the one with Jar Jar Binks," until me and my dad reminded her that Jar Jar Binks is from Star WARS, was the one who was proactively pushing ME to see this movie, rather than the other way around). ... Now, I know that "schadenfreude" is the word for the pleasure that one derives from the misfortunes of others, but ... is there a similar single word for the pleasure that one derives from having their most pessimistic expectations proven wrong? Because I went to see Star Trek with the folks this past Sunday, and what do you know? Against all my expectations, it turns out that The Kids Are Alright.  Mr. Cynical, in his own otherwise positive review of the movie, despaired somewhat of its depoliticization of Gene Roddenberry's inherently political core concept of Star Trek, seeing it as a symptom of how Hollywood has become increasingly sensitive to politically extremist and easily offended segments of the population, and while I suspect he has a point, I actually see it more as the result of Star Trek becoming a victim of the relative success of its own original message. Yes, back in the late 1960s, it was indeed very progressive to show a black woman serving as an equal alongside the rest of the crew of the Enterprise, but when modern reality has moved on to the point that we now have a black guy with an African name commanding America's ship of state IRL ... well, no, racism certainly isn't "dead," but having a deliberately multicultural crew that's still being commanded by a WASP like James T. Kirk seems almost ... quaint, by comparison. The original politics of Star Trek are no longer forward-thinking, as they were for the era in which they originated, as much as they are an accepted baseline now (even most modern conservative media critics will accept a team that looks like a United Colors of Benetton ad, so long as the job of leading them is still treated as a White Man's Burden). So, bereft of anything of substance to say politically anymore, the functions of Star Trek become a) to deliver action and adventure with plenty of creatively "skientific" premises and justifications, and b) to offer us comfortingly familiar and, ultimately, reassuringly upbeat character interactions. This is a far from perfect movie. The car chase scene with the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" playing in the background was pointless and openly pandering to the OMG THIS AIN'T UR DAD'S STAR TREK, D00DZ demographic, and the scenes of Kirk being pursued by predators on an ice planet, and Scotty being pumped through the pipes of the Enterprise's engineering section, felt similarly superfluous to the plot. Although I actually appreciated the attempt to more clearly distinguish the aesthetic of the warlike Romulans, with their bald heads and facial tattoos, from their more peaceful Vulcan relatives, their grunge outfits and the death metal architecture of their ship not only seemed generic in their darkness, but also gave me bad flashbacks of the Remans in Star Trek: Nemesis. As for Romulan archvillain Nero, even Eric Bana could only do so much with such a paint-by-numbers standard-issue Star Trek movie adversary - oh, wow, yet another wounded madman who's going to use his deus ex machina super-weapon to revenge himself by destroying civilization as we know it. Even considering the scale of what he was able to achieve, Nero was no Khan. That being said? Of all the times that time travel has been used, and arguably OVERused, in the Star Trek franchise, this was one of the few times where it actually felt like it WORKED, for me at least. Joe Quesada, take fucking note; THIS is how you reboot continuity, without invalidating the canon of all the stories that have come before. I mean, in many ways, it SHOULDN'T have worked, but somehow, it DID. And I suppose that's how I'd sum up the movie as a whole - it worked far better than it probably had any right to do. For all the talk about Abrams approaching this movie as a non-fan, it was littered with callbacks to the original series. A red-shirt dies on the away mission! Sulu is a swordsman! Kirk beds down a green-skinned Orion girl! Pike is in a wheelchair at the end! (I've already noted how poor my mom's memory for popular culture is, so when she turned to me in the theater, after Bruce Greenwood first appeared onscreen as Christopher Pike, and whispered, "Captain Pike ... he was the one who wound up in that robot chair with the flashing lights, right?", I WAS SO PROUD OF HER.) Hell, even Jonathan Archer's DOG from Enterprise gets a shout-out (Scotty got in trouble for testing out his transporter theories on "Admiral Archer's" beagle, after all). Perhaps most importantly, in spite of being played by all-new, all-different, and much younger actors, the essential dynamics of the characters still came across. John Cho was serviceable enough as Sulu, even though they didn't give him much to do, while Anton Yelchin was there to do what Walter Koenig was hired to do on the original series as Chekhov, by pronouncing his lines with a broadly overdone Russian accent, and giving teenage girls a cute boy their age to schlick to (Koenig was cast on the original series in part because, at the time, he bore a striking resemblance to Davy Jones of The Monkees, who were beating Star Trek in the ratings, NO FUCKING JOKE). The contrived method of bringing Scotty on board the Enterprise was a bit painful to watch, but once he was there, Simon Pegg pretty much did what Scotty is supposed to do, which is to alternate between bitching and congratulating himself, with a Scottish burr straight out of Berlitz. Karl Urban's performance as McCoy was INSANELY committed to mimicking all the mannerisms of DeForest Kelly in the role, to the point that the only other actor I can recall being as bizarrely devoted to METHOD-ACTING a pop culture icon is Matthew Lillard as Shaggy, in the live-action Scooby Doo films, and just as with Lillard's Shaggy, Urban's McCoy was a beautiful thing to behold. By contrast, Pine made a wise move by NOT trying to ape Shatner - because, let's face it, Shatner is the only actor out there who can get away with Being Shatner, and even then, it's not always a guarantee - but at the same time, looking back on it, I'm impressed by how much Pine managed to MOVE like Shatner, right down to his swaggering strides and his spread-legged Slouch Of Authority in the captain's chair. Which brings us to Spock, and his own Circle Of Friends. It's hardly an exaggeration to say that Spock is the most important character in this movie, and the number of other characters who sort of exist in his ORBIT is a testament to how central he is to all of the drama. Ben Cross is a worthy successor to Mark Lenard as Sarek. At first, especially given the troubled relationship between Spock and Sarek in the original series, I was worried that Sarek would be reduced to an unfeeling prick, but when he finally told Spock, "I married your mother because I LOVED her," I was touched by his ... well, his humanity, for lack of a better word for it. I didn't even recognize Winona Ryder as Spock's mom, but in the few scenes she had, she conveyed the right amount of proud, but restrained, affection for him (restrained by her son's choice, not by her own, which was also kind of a neat humanizing touch, since you don't have to be a Vulcan to recognize the back and forth of "Mom, quit fussing with me!" and "Oh, alright, if you insist" between mom and son in that scene). And holy shit, not only did Zoe Saldana work as Uhura in her own right, all confidence and intelligence and professionalism and strength, but she and Quinto made the romance between Uhura and Spock both credible and compelling. Even if I hadn't recently been converted by my LJ friends into the Church Of Spock/Uhura Is Canon On The Original Series, I still would have loved seeing this ship set sail, because the way it's played onscreen, I GET it. I not only UNDERSTAND why these two people would hook up, but I can BELIEVE their relationship (after Sarek discloses his love for Spock's mom, it's interesting to note that Spock and Uhura finally engage in a very Public Display Of Affection in the transporter room, and Kirk's reaction to the fact that Spock knows Uhura's first name is fucking priceless). Which brings us to The Two Spocks. As Spock, Quinto strikes what appears to be a carefully measured balance between Urban and Pine's styles. Quinto is clearly conscious of Leonard Nimoy's mannerisms as Spock, but at the same time, he's not trying to be an impressionist, either. What's oddly ironic is that, in spite of the trauma that he suffers in this movie, Quinto's Spock actually winds up much more emotionally healthy than Nimoy's Spock ever was during the original series, not only because he reconciles with his father much sooner than Spock did, and even pursues a romance that eventually becomes public knowledge, but also because he manages to integrate his dedication to logic with his underlying feelings, much better than Nimoy's Spock did during the original series. Quinto's Spock isn't REPRESSED, as far too many writers have mistakenly interpreted Nimoy's Spock to be; instead, by the end of the movie, he's ZEN. And while I was momentarily worried that this movie was going to turn Quinto's Spock into The Last Of The Time Lords, which would have been insufferably emo-riffic, it instead turns the Vulcan race into the crew of the Battlestar Galactica, which could actually yield some interesting implications. I've seen a lot of Trekkers mention that the scenes between Pine as Kirk and Nimoy as Spock made them wibble, and yeah, it's hard not to be moved, when Nimoy's Spock tells young Kirk, "I am, and always shall be, your friend," or admits to Kirk, "I am emotionally compromised." But for my money, the best such nostalgia scenes were actually between Nimoy and Quinto. Even more than Kirk meeting Picard managed to be, this was a true meeting of the generations, and a passing of the torch from old to new. And Jesus, I must be the biggest fucking nerd ever, because I'm actually getting a lump in my throat just REMEMBERING that scene, which reminds me of nothing so much as the "Time Crash" mini-episode of Doctor Who, in which David Tennant and Peter Davison paid homage to each other in a similar fashion. In both cases, you have two different eras of the same character, paying tribute to themselves, but doing so with wit and a spirit of fun. And how metafictionally fitting that, while Quinto's Spock is now the one who will boldly go where no one has gone before, Nimoy's Spock has LITERALLY become a custodian of the Add all this to tweaks of the costume and tech designs that managed to be awesomely retro-futuristic - right down to the little details, like seeing the actual phaser placements on the ship itself, as well as the blue light/red light switch between the "stun" and "kill" settings on the phaser pistols, the special effects managed the paradox of both showing us the seams and polishing them up, in ways that the overly glossy touchpad surfaces of Star Trek: The Next Generation never could - and you've got a total package that, in spite of its flaws, made me say to myself, so many times in the theater, "Wow ... I'd forgotten how COOL all of this could be." TL;DR? Consider this a recommendation. | |||
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